So, with that in mind, here are the nine most depressing films of the past nine years.

9. The Dead Girl

A dead body is found in a field one quiet morning, and we are thrust headfirst into the excellent but deeply soul-shattering film, The Dead Girl. This character study examines not only the events leading up to the girl’s death, but how her demise affects the people in her life as well as other people in the community, including the killer himself. The cast is fantastic, and the movie is very well-written and directed. It just leaves you feeling perfectly empty inside. Watching it will make you parents out there give your daughters that extra kiss on the forehead when you tuck them in to bed at night.

8. Antichrist

Start with a child falling out of the window of a building and end with a woman committing such depraved acts of violence against her husband that blood spurts out of his penis, and you’ve got one of the nine most depressing films of the last nine years. Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is another bizarre accomplishment by the kooky Danish director. It deals with the grieving process, guilt, misogyny, and self-destruction that spins out of control and into full-on horror mode by film’s end. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg give awesome performances as a couple who retreat to a cabin in the woods as they attempt to recover from the accidental death of their son. What was supposed to consist of a little R&R and some soul-searching instead becomes a living hell of depravity and biblical archetypes. Oh, and there’s a talking fox in it, which isn’t at all depressing, but I simply could not discuss this movie without mentioning that it contains a talking fox.

7. Winter’s Bone

Do you like movies about meth-cooking fathers who abandon their families, leaving them to fend off poverty and the local hillbilly gangsters for themselves? Then Winter’s Bone is the movie for you! As you can probably gather from the above description, this movie is full of sunshine and flowers and hugs. It does not include any scenes of domestic violence, and certainly at no point in the film is the heroine forced to sever the hands of her father’s corpse with a chainsaw. Nope, none of that here. It’s just happy times all around.

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